Payment Data Transfer

Payment Data Transfer (PDT) is a secure method to retrieve the details about a PayPal transaction so that you can display them to your customer. It is used in combination with PayPal Payments Standard, so that after a customer returns to your website after paying on the PayPal site, they can instantly view a confirmation message with the details of the transaction. PDT is not meant to be used with credit card or Express Checkout transactions. This page describes how PDT works and how to configure your account to use PDT.

How PDT Works

When a customer pays you, PayPal sends the transaction ID of the payment to you by appending the transaction ID to a URL you specify in your account Profile. This information is sent through an HTTP GET request as the tx=transactionID name and value pair:

After you get the transaction ID, you post a FORM to PayPal that includes the transaction ID and your identity token, a string value that identifies your account to PayPal. The following instructions describe how to get your identity token. The form looks like this: